A Senju in the Stars, Chapter 14

The wind shifted.

And then the world slowed.

Over the jagged rim of the horizon came a shape—massive and bent and terrible. A titan of blackened metal and scorched steel, its body warped by heat and war, its limbs fused with ruin. It moved on legs like siege towers, each footfall tearing gouges into the earth. Its frame was humanoid only in the barest sense, hunched and broad and bristling with armaments that no sane forge could have dreamt into being. Cannons jutted from its spine like bone growths. Rotating weapons groaned from beneath its shoulders. Its chest pulsed with something alive, a glowing red core half-seen through cables and rusted plating.

It came to a halt. One weapon turned. A click. A hum.

Then it fired.

What came was not light. Not fire. But something between the two. A beam that howled like wind through a broken canyon. It struck the ground a kilometer away, and where it hit, the stone ceased to be. A flash of white, a valley scooped from the world as though carved by the hand of some vengeful god. The crater glowed with molten light. Nothing within it remained. Millions must’ve died in an instant. 

The ground shook as another giant lumbered forth from the horizon, shorter this time, but no less menacing. 

And then came another.

And another.

And another.

They rose behind the first like ghosts from a mass grave. Dozens. Scores. Each a colossus clad in armor that had never known rust, only war. Their shapes varied—some with arms like battering rams, others bristling with guns from knee to crown. Their heads were domed and impassive, some crowned with horns, others flanked by emitters howling into the wind and sky. All of them moved in eerie synchrony, their joints grinding like millstones, their weapons heating the air until the very sky seemed to ripple with the pressure.

The world shook.

Their footfalls thundered like the drumbeat of execution. With each step they claimed the land, and with each volley they unmade it. Beams of light lashed the horizon. Plumes of flame turned soldiers to ash. The heat from their passing curled stone and set wreckage ablaze. The air itself screamed.

Hashirama stepped forward, eyes narrowing at the distortion in the space between them. The energy was familiar. Foul. Twisted. It was the same that bled from the daemons he had fought before. That cloying, unnatural presence that gnawed at the borders of perception. But here it clung to steel. To iron. It rode the hulls of the machines like rot on flesh.

He raised his hand, let the energy settle over his palm. Felt it shudder against his own. They were alive, in a way. Or rather, something lived within them. Buried deep in their cores. Dormant. Watching. Breathing through tubes and wire.

Jinchuriki. That was the word that came to him. Not perfect, but close. Tailed beasts sealed in flesh, bound into cages of chakra and skin. These titans, perhaps, were similar—spirits bound not into human hosts, but into machines. A question formed in his mind, unanswered. What sort of creature willingly caged itself inside iron and gun?

He stepped back.

There were too many. Not one or two. A legion.

Across the blackened plain they came, an army of death-golems. Each stride brought them closer. Closer to the Hive. Closer to whatever still lived beyond.

He turned his head.

Batu stood beside him, unmoved. His armor smoked from battle. The sigils on his shoulder still ran with blood.

“Legio Mortis,” Batu said. His voice low and steady. “Titan legion. Traitors. Destroyers.”

Hashirama said nothing for a moment. His eyes did not leave the advancing machines. He watched one of them level its weapons at a distant column of friendly armor—half a mile off—and then reduce them to nothing with a single pulse. Flames leapt a hundred feet into the sky.

“Dies Irae leads them,” Batu added. “Greatest and most powerful of the Traitor Titans. If they reach Imperial Palace, no telling what damage they do.” 

Hashirama nodded. As he understood it, the government of this entire world was located in the Imperial Palace. It was from there that they coordinated their defenses and logistics, where their Emperor ruled. It was their final bastion. If it fell, then the enemy would win and the innocent would suffer. Hashirama did not like the sound of that. “Then we stop them.”

Batu nodded. “How?”

Hashirama eyed the titans as they marched across the shattered plain. He could still feel the fatigue settling into his bones, his chakra reduced from sealing away the survivors of Red Hope. His reserves had dwindled to embers. Without proper cultivation—without an hour of silence to gather and refine the tainted air around him into something clean and useful—he would not be able to conjure his Sage Mode again. And without Sage Mode, his most powerful techniques would remain out of reach.

But an hour was something he did not have. Batu stood beside him, rigid in his warplate, his eyes locked forward with a grim and desperate urgency. An hour here could mean the deaths of another million souls. Another billion, perhaps. Time was not theirs to spend.

So he watched.

From behind distant ridgelines came scattered volleys of artillery fire. Shells streaked upward in arcs of smoke and flame, reaching for the towering colossi that lumbered like moving mountains of iron. Explosions flowered briefly across their surfaces—white blooms against rust-colored plating—but each time the shells drew close, something rippled in the air around the titans, and the shells seemed to vanish. Some invisible barrier flickered in and out of existence, a shimmering veil that defied Hashirama's senses.

He narrowed his eyes. Watched closer. A shield. Some barrier crafted by these traitors, a layer beyond mere steel. He had seen its kind before, but never on this scale. How strong was it? Could it be pierced by sheer force alone, or must it be bypassed through cunning and subtlety? All around the field lay the carcasses of fallen titans—giant heaps of blackened metal and twisted wire. Their barriers had been broken somehow. There was a limit, then. But what that limit was, he did not yet know.

He was gonna have to do this the old fashioned way.

“Do these things have crewmen inside them?” Hashirama turned to Batu. 

The Astartes nodded. “Yes.” 

Hashirama turned away. “Alright, this is going to be a little dicey; so, stay back and away, unless you want me to seal you again.” 

“I’ll stay back, just in case.” 

Hashirama moved. Fast. The ground shuddered with each distant step of the titans, but his feet were sure upon the rubble-strewn plain. He ran toward the largest of them, a creature of steel and hate, hunched like a dying god beneath its own arsenal. Cannons jutted from its shoulders, its arms, its spine. A beast shaped for siege.

Hashirama made a seal and light bent around him, turning him functionally invisible. Ninja Art: Chameleon Jutsu. Useful, because the titans were not by their lonesome. No, they were accompanied by convoys of armored vehicles, support units. None of them noticed him as he passed by them, unseen and unheard.

As he ran, his eye caught a small stone lying on the ground, half-covered in ash. He stooped once, quick and smooth, and scooped it up in one hand. Without pause, he flung it forward. A flick of the wrist. The pebble spun through the air and clinked against the metal foot of the titan with a sound like a coin dropped on stone. Then it bounced. Rolled. Came to rest in a curl of twisted metal.

Nothing.

He frowned.

Above him, a shell streaked from a distant line. High arc. Bright trail. It drew closer, whistling down like a curse from heaven. And then, a dozen meters out from the titan’s bulk, it vanished. Not exploded. Not deflected. Simply… gone.

He looked up again at the towering thing. Its guns still burned from recent fire. Smoke curled from the barrel vents like incense in a temple desecrated long ago. The titan did not move. It stood firm, braced against the recoil of its own fury. Waiting, perhaps, for the next order. Or perhaps it waited for nothing at all.

Hashirama made a hand seal without thought. A single Wood Clone rose beside him, shaped from bark and chakra and will. The clone nodded once, then sprinted forward, its pace smooth, its path unwavering.

The clone passed the point where the shell had vanished.

Nothing happened.

No flicker. No ripple. No flash of burning light or snapping air. The clone simply ran through, unscathed, unbothered, unmarked.

Hashirama blinked once, then followed.

He crossed the line the same way, his stride sure, his posture calm. He felt no push of energy. No pressure. No pull. Only the sound of boots on broken stone and the distant thunder of war. The air was thick, but not heavy. Still, but not silent.

He slowed to a halt and looked up again at the titan.

Its surface was a cathedral of rivets and scars. Dozens of cannons perched atop its shoulders like vultures. Spires of sharpened steel jutted from its back. Its plating was carved with glyphs and runes, many glowing faint with some inner light. Corrupted symbols, perhaps. Daemonic. But what struck him most was that the machine had not turned to face him. It remained still, braced, its vast limbs locked.

"Huh," he said aloud.

He raised a brow.

He looked down at his own hand, flexed the fingers, and then turned his gaze back toward the towering beast. The clone had moved to its right flank and stood now beside one of the hydraulic struts embedded in the ankle. Hashirama followed, footsteps careful, deliberate.

"Convenient," he muttered. And meant it.

Because whatever shield this creature bore, it really didn’t seem to care about him or what he could do. And that made it… uniquely vulnerable to sabotage by units or individuals that could slip right through the titan’s support teams. Hashirama leapt high and held onto a platform close to the titan’s left leg. There, Hashirama took a moment to study the hip joint. See, a machine this big would require a lot of components to work together at all times. Some components were more important than others, certainly, but they all needed to operate as one. The failure of a single component, especially the important ones, would cause utter failure. 

In this case, destroying a single one of its leg joints entirely would mean the entire titan would just fall down. 

But, what jutsu could he use? 

Wood Style, unless supplanted with Senjutsu, was incapable of explosive bursts of power–the sort that was necessary to destroy the joint. He also doubted explosive tags for this sort of task as those were better suited for soft targets. Fire Jutsu was out as Hashirama did not possess an affinity for fire and could not call on the higher forms of Fire Jutsu. 

He paused for just a moment and looked back. Didn’t Naruto have that swirling chakra ball thing? What did he call it? Oh, yes, Rasengan, a vortex that spun in every direction simultaneously. Very dangerous. Also very destructive and, subsequently, perfect for his task. Hashirama held out his right hand and pumped and shaped Chakra into a vortex that swirled and spun in all directions, creating the familiar blue shape of the Rasengan. 

Too small. So he made it bigger and bigger, until it was the size of a small boulder. 

To increase its cutting power, Hashirama infused water chakra into the vortex and watched as it grew visible, interlocking rings and discs of water that spun so fast they were akin to blades. Perfect. Smiling, Hashirama hurled the Water Rasengan into the joint and watched as the Jutsu detonated and, in a spray of water, blasted apart the joint. 

The titan rumbled as it lurched to the side, falling.